Twitter the Killer

There has long been a tension between Twitter-the-company and Twitter-the-open-platform. The microblogging service began as a way to broadcast text-message status updates to friends, and has grown and evolved largely because of what third party developers and Twitter’s own users have done with it.

Today, Twitter is no longer about what its users had for lunch. Instead, Twitter is about what’s going on in the world – and yes, lunch is sometimes a part of that. The company, which has been profitable for some time, is now trying to get control of its business, and is doing so at the expense of the open platform.

On Thursday, the company announced an update to its Application Programming Interface, or API, which dictates how developers can use the data that flows from Twitter’s platform. Twitter API 1.1 is far more restrictive on third-party client software, and could serve to choke off popular applications that grow too big. Very soon, that slick Twitter app you’re so fond of may cease to exist.

At the very least, third-party apps will begin to look a lot more like Twitter’s own apps, which are usually inferior in terms of design and feature sets. For those who use non-Twitter clients to calm the chaos of the network, Twitter is about to become a much more noisy and annoying place.

In the most simplistic terms, Twitter is going to require authentication from all clients so that it knows who is drinking from its firehose. In addition, it will limit how often per hour applications can take a drink, depending on what those applications do. For the most part, these won’t affect end users too much.

But two other changes will have profound effects. Twitter will limit the number of users of a third application can have, with two service levels: 100,000 and 200,000 users. Exceed those, and a developer will be required to “work with” Twitter to grow further.

In addition, Twitter will have more control over how individual tweets are displayed. Arment speculates this is how Twitter will begin to make money from third party apps:

There will definitely be more rules that we’re not ready to discuss yet, possibly because we haven’t decided what they are yet, or possibly because we know you’re not going to like them.

For instance, I bet this is finally how clients will be required to display tweet ads. That requirement, probably worded roughly as “you must display every tweet in a timeline, and display them all consistently”, will also kill any clients’ filter and mute features.

That last part is the aspect of this that bothers me the most. I rely heavily on third party Twitter clients to filter out what I consider to be junk – automated Tweets from other networks and services that clutter up an otherwise useful stream. I’m not interested in seeing Foursquare check-ins, how far someone has jogged via Runkeeper, or a roundup of weekly tweets from Paper.li. In fact, I use a Twitter client called Echofon to filter out nearly four dozen robotweeting sources, and if I suddenly had to see those all the time, I’d probably consider abandoning my regular use of it.

My secret hope is that something about these new rules will kill off the ability of other services to pump junk into Twitter, but something tells me that will go unfulfilled.

There are also implications here for news organizations that use Twitter both as a newsgathering tool and to disseminate stories, photos and video. What happens to frequently used news tools like CoverItLive or Storify, which we rely on heavily? CoverItLive allows users to import tweets as part of the blogging process, a feature that could go away with the new rules. Storify lets you organize social media updates to tell a story, and it may or may not fit Twitter’s new display guidelines.